Ignite Fusion in the house

Last monday, I met Ilyas Hamidzai, one of the core developers of Ignite Fusion, in Mönchengladbach. We had a really fun and interesting talk about… err.. everything? 🙂

To let you know the backgrounds of this meeting:

I first got in touch with Ignite Fusion about a year ago due to a mailing list post, so I downloaded it and gave it a try. Without wishing to boast, but I’m sure I’m at least one of the Top5-Bug-/Featurefinders, so the IF team and I are in something that we may call “close contact”. 😉

Ilyas spent his winter holidays in germany, so I did not want to miss the chance to see him. After showing an excellent example of my navigation skills (I really drove a weiiird criss-cross-route in Mönchengladbach), Ilyas, his wife and I met in a cafe in MG-City, had some coffees, talked about indeed almost everything. It started with technical stuff like CF and Ignite, the disadvantages of the german keyboard layout 😉 etc. and ended up in talking about the currently unbelievably high petrol prices in germany. 😉

I showed him a small app I coded using IgniteFusion, he let me know some details about Ignite’s history (why/when it was coded) and even unveiled some secrets about what Ignite is able to do, and what is currently planned for the future.

For example, one thing I did not know about Ignite is that it can perform as a standalone socket listener, much like the event gateways in ColdFusion. In a CF template, you say something like

<CFSOCKET name=”blah” port=”999″…>

<CFWHILE TRUE>

(cf code here)

</CFWHILE>

</CFSOCKET>
(don’t know if I got that code exactly right)

Store that in a cfm template, call the ignitedb.exe c:\path_to_template.cfm and ignite will listen on the specified port, executing the cf code inside cfwhile on request to the socket. If THAT isn’t cool!
Unfortunately, this feature is not in the current version (only in V2.3), but will probably be re-implemented in the next release.

Finally, they even gave me a present for Agent R – I was kind of overwhelmed by this. Thanks again for that! 😉

To sum it up: download Ignite Fusion and give it a try! It does a suprisingly good job in interpreting CFML and is simply perfect for small to medium-sized (and maybe large?) CF projects. It’s not 100% CF-Compatible, but somehow “feels” like the real thing, and hey, it’s FREE!

Besides, I’m currently planning an article on comparing Ignite to ColdFusion.
The points I will check are: